


Dispatches

by CMOTScribbler



Category: Temeraire - Naomi Novik
Genre: F/M, Gen, Headcanon, Missing Scene, Peninsular War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:47:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,313
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25224850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CMOTScribbler/pseuds/CMOTScribbler
Summary: Jane and Wellesley fight in the Peninsula and Lily’s formation rejoins the campaign, bearing news from the East.
Relationships: Jane Roland/Arthur Wellesley 1st Duke of Wellington
Comments: 18
Kudos: 27





	Dispatches

“Just so we understand each other,” Wellesley said. “You are telling me, the commander of the allied forces, and your superior, to clear out of your bed?”

“I suppose so,” Jane said distractedly, trying to rekindle the brazier. It was December, and even in the Spanish Peninsula, the wind was biting cold. “Although you are not my superior. I can see how this ridiculous business of me not being allowed around headquarters can engender such misconceptions. But yes, camp beds being as damned narrow as they are, I should prefer to have one to myself and not be tired tomorrow morning.”

Wellesley looked at her half outraged, half amused, as he pulled on his trousers. “Damn you, Roland. I haven‘t been treated like this since I was a raw colonel. I must make it clear to you that if anything untoward comes of this, I am not paying up, nor owing you any recognition.”

“Not a problem, Sir,” she said, flatly, the cinders finally catching a little. She cupped her hands around the meagre flame. “We always have use in the Corps.”

She smiled into his outraged face, not the least sorry, only a little disappointed in the fellow’s view of womankind. Did he never bother to speak to his conquests? As if she would have allowed him to lay a hand on her, if there had been any risk.

To his credit, he recovered quickly. “Well, in that case, may I pay another visit tomorrow, Madam?”, this said with a mocking bow.

“Admiral,” she said. “May I pay another visit tomorrow, _Admiral_. And no, you may not, thank you.”

“High standards, have we?” he muttered, groping for his boots. “What’s in that gossip about you and that unhanged traitor, what was his name again… Laurence?”

She would have liked to clap his mouth shut for this piece of insolence, but that was more than he deserved. She shrugged her shoulders. “What’s there in the story of you and that opera singer, what was her name again… a Miss Grassini?” she said. “Yes, even we benighted aviators do read the papers, sometimes.”

“Damn you” he said, chuckling a little. “I mean, damn you, _Admiral_. Well, no hard feelings. I take it you are off early tomorrow, so we shall rendevouz at Pamplona next week.” He touched his hat, threw his coat over his shoulder and strode from the tent, cheerfully whistling a tune for the benefit of the guardsmen.

Jane looked after him disdainfully and picked up the field blanket to pull around her bare shoulders. Well, for her part, she could now say with confidence that the rumours about Arthur Wellesley being the legendary lover of the age were utterly exaggerated. Average at most, and entirely selfish.

However, selfishness was no crime, she thought as she rose to cross the tent, wrapping the blanket around herself. Not in the middle of a war. She stared at the thin crust of ice that had formed on the water in the washbowl. In a sudden fit of something, she smashed a fist into it, sending shards of ice flying and water splashing. The fresh cut on the back of her hand began to itch and throb again.

They were in winter quarters, formally, but the guerrilla war had not stopped when the frost had cast its spell. Only yesterday, Excidium’s formation and a few of the Flechas had routed a Republican camp in a mountain village. The enemy troops had interspersed themselves with the civilians and there had been an unfortunate degree of bloodshed, not what anyone would call honourable fighting. The whitewashed walls of the hovels had been spattered with blood and pockmarked with bullet-holes by the time they lifted away again, and the image of a mangled corpse in a doorstep seemed etched at the back of her eyes, unrecognizable after the longwing acid but much too small to be an adult. She had been almost grateful for the boarders, for some open combat, face-to-face, and the sharp pain and blood on her hand to recall her to her senses, before she had run the soldier through and cut his straps.

Jane stood for another moment, her breath white in the air. She was exhausted, physically, but there could be no thought of rest. She washed and dressed mechanically and then shouted for her servant to tidy the tent and do something about the goddamn fire. She sat down at her desk while he worked, his wooden leg thumping oddly on the hard-packed ground, and attempted to busy herself with the documents and letters. But the topmost piece of paper was a report of the last day’s fighting, a list of ammunitions, stores and prisoners taken, three cannon won, and a grimly factual body count.

Perhaps the dead child had not been a civilian, she told herself, but a runner or ensign in Joseph Bonaparte’s service, much like her own daughter… She hadn’t had any letters from Emily, for a long time.

She dragged herself to her feet. Speaking to Excidium might help her snap out of this gloom, she thought, and took up a map as a pretext for seeing him. The old dear rarely spoke much. His experienced advice had won them many a day, now that she was involving him in her decisions, although she knew even her own captains liked to snigger about it behind her back, _a woman, under her very dragon’s thumb…_ She did not care, as long as it delivered results, and she would have trusted Excidium blindly, a thing she could not say of her subordinates.

She pulled on her admiral’s coat, lit a cigar and stepped out into the cold night, the promise of snow in the air but not a flake in the sky. The guard by the tent door immediately ceased his whispering with one of the aide-de-camps and stood to attention.

Jane ignored them. She did not have anything to reproach herself for. Why, what was the harm in finally getting down to what every last foot soldier in their camp had been gossiping about since the beginning of the campaign. A little warmth in harsh times, it was only natural. Wellesley had looked at her with a raised brow that evening, over the maps, and she had looked back, no pretense of prettiness. She had been cold, tired and hungry, and the simple, animal quality of it had blotted out all thought for a while. There had been no deeper satisfaction, no comfort – if there was any such thing to be found in it, without deceiving oneself. She spat, a stale taste in her mouth. It lingered.

There was a commotion on the far side of their camp. She caught sight of Frette a little distance away and waved him over to fetch a lantern and follow her down the frozen path to the dragon-clearings. Babel incarnate, she thought, walking the lines of tents: not only English and Spanish spoken, but Catalan and Italian, Portuguese and French, German and even a smattering of Polish and some other Baltic tongue, a ragtag force barely held together by shared hatred of Bonaparte and Wellesley's iron fist. But above the general din, she instantly caught the rustle of a Longwing’s wings, and not Excidium’s for sure. But it was impossible. Mortiferus was in a field hospital near Salamanca and not expected to rejoin them until the spring. She quickened her steps.

There were five dragons in the clearing, and Lily in the lead.

“We‘ve come through Russia… from China, that is,” Captain Harcourt called out without further ado, running a gloved hand across her face. She looked pale and exhausted as she clambered off Lily's back, too tired for any formal greeting. Jane put an arm under hers to steady her when she would have stumbled on legs stiff from hours spent aloft.

“Do you need time to see her settled?” Jane asked, nodding at Lily, but Harcourt shook her head and massaged her thighs.

“No, Admiral, I am ready to make my report. It’s urgent.”

Jane took her back to her tent and accepted the bundle of dispatches. She put them aside. “Thank you, I will read the niceties later. Tell me – what news?”

Harcourt let herself drop into one of the folding camp chairs and downed the glass of Andalusian rum Jane handed her. “What was the last report you had?”

“Brazil,” Jane said.

Harcourt nodded, and quickly recounted: their fraught sojourn in Japan and their crossing of China – an alliance forged, if a shaky one. “Emily was well when I last saw her,” she concluded. “Coming along splendidly, and made midwingman now.”

“So does your little boy,” Jane said. “I think I have… ah, here.” She opened a box of letters and shuffled through them, drawing one out. “I’ve made some inquiries. You may keep it. I couldn't do anything about that wretched governess business, as it appears his father’s family have legal custody... I'm sorry I cannot give you leave to set things straight, but I suppose you may write to his aunts and complain.”

Catherine read the letter eagerly, a quiet smile rising to her lips: A governess’ report in sharp, neat writing, complaining of a boy who _runs after the dragons of the courier-covert all day long, tears up his clothes, will not pay due attention to his Numbers and Letters, and does not sit still at Church._ “Never mind. It does not seem any damage has been done yet,” Catherine said. “Pity he’s no girl. But I suppose that is no fault of his, poor thing.”

“You still have time for a second,” Jane said, drily. “Or even a third, if need be. It’s not like it is all unpleasantness. Though if you have any shred of sense in you, you will find a fellow aviator to oblige you, instead of some quixotic sailor.”

They laughed and Jane refilled their glasses. Catherine cast a glance at the maps, strewn with counters to show the enemy positions, and then looked at Jane. “How have you been?” she asked. “No, I mean, apart from that,” shaking her head when Jane would have turned to the maps to expound on the state of the campaign. It was not a question a Captain would have dared ask their commanding officer in any any other branch of the service, but then, their ways were different.

Jane’s hand hovered over the map for another moment, caught unawares, then she let it drop to her lap. Skin dried and cracked from flying in the winter air, the badly-healing gash, someone’s dried black blood under her fingernails. “Splendidly, thank you. I have weathered a London ball and two formal dinners by now, if you will credit it. And Excidium has all his weight back on him now, since the Plague,” she said and forced herself to smile. “We are a hardy lot, are we not?”

Catherine nodded. After a pause, she said, quietly: “I do not want to be a bearer of tales. I last saw him two months ago. But when we parted, in China, they had put him in command of a force of Chinese dragons larger than anything we‘ve ever seen.”

When Jane stayed silent and unmoving, she continued, colour rising to her pale cheeks: “They _cannot_ hang him, with that. Not even after. They will have to-”

“I thank you, Captain,” Jane said, cutting her off. “That is enough. You may go. Ask the herdsmaster to give your dragons a bullock each. He will put up a fuss as supply has been wretchedly thin on the ground, and I'm afraid it'll be the usual gruel and horsemeat from tomorrow, but by God, you and your formation have earned it.”

Harcourt nodded and bowed, holding up the governess’ letter. “I thank you again, Admiral.”

As soon as the tent-flap had closed behind her, Jane took the dispatches and tore them open in eager haste. Little had written as much, and Warren, and Berkeley, Granby too – their estimates of numbers included in something called a _jalan_ varying slightly, but the overall picture much the same.

She quit her pacing and forced herself to sit down at her desk, the letters spread out before her. There was the military advantage to consider, Lily’s formation and Iskierka and the quiet mountain-sized beast she had glimpsed at their rear, every wing and talon desperately welcome in the bloody stalemate across the Lines. A strengthening of the western front against Bonaparte might well win them the crucial respite necessary to allow the Russians to regroup, and to bring the wavering Prussians and Austrians around.

She tried to reign in her racing thoughts as she picked up a handful of their own counters to place on the map, the little tin figures heavy in her hand. To imagine three hundred of them massed on the map... The old cigar box on the desk did not contain enough counters to even fashion such a force. Jane was no dreamer at heart – she had found it a fault most unbecoming her station - but for a moment, she stepped back and indulged in the sheer fancy of it, and could not help concluding on _the faces of Their Lordships at the Admiralty when they hear of it..._

Following a sudden impulse, she drew open the bottom drawer of the traveling desk and, after a little searching, produced another small dragon-figurine. Through some quirk of the casting process, a flash of tin stood out proudly on its neck, almost like a ruff. She had not found it in her to have the fault sanded down or to throw the tin dragon away.

She put it back on the map's Eastern reaches, with a small and most satisfying thud, and even dared a smile. She breathed again. Not all was lost.


End file.
